Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez hosted representatives from Human Rights Watch on Thursday, 18 years after the country expelled the monitor’s director.
The landmark meeting marks the latest ripple effect from the U.S. toppling of iron-fisted president Nicolas Maduro in a military raid in January.
Venezuela suffered a wave of repression under Maduro, who oversaw an increasingly authoritarian government and whose two re-elections were widely dismissed as fraudulent.
Rodriguez and the Human Rights Watch delegation, led by deputy executive director Federico Borello, discussed “adopting measures to foster plurality of expression and consolidating an environment of greater democratic coexistence,” the Venezuelan government said in a statement.
The meeting aimed to “reaffirm commitment to strengthening peace, diplomacy and coordinated work with multilateral organizations,” it added.
Maduro’s predecessor, leftist revolutionary Hugo Chavez, expelled Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at the rights monitoring group, in 2008.
Chavez also restricted independent international organizations’ entry into Venezuela.
Since coming to power, Rodriguez has released hundreds of political prisoners and announced plans to close the notorious El Helicoide prison, where rights groups say inmates were tortured by Maduro’s intelligence services.
Her government also said Thursday it had unblocked some news sites that had been censored for years.
But UN investigators said this week that Venezuela has maintained a “repressive apparatus” responsible for illegal detentions and disappearances, despite the improvements in rights since Maduro’s ouster.
Rodriguez governs under intense pressure from Washington and has opened up Venezuela’s mining, oil and electricity sectors to foreign and private capital.
